Our hero Mark Robarts, then,m is neither devil nor angel, with aptitudes for good and evil. The spectacular insight, given go early in the novel, is that if he had been more conceited, that is, thought too highly of himself, he might have been better able to resist temptation, when it came his way.
Note: This letter and the commentary that follows were found in the lava-covered ruins of Herculaneum. It is apparently a copy of a letter sent by a learned Greek to a young Roman friend of Greek ancestry, the poet Statius. The commentary is the response of an educated pagan upon first reading a Christian text, The Gospel According to Saint John.
For anyone who has the time to read a good work of English fiction, I have started to reread Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage. I’ll post an occasional comment and perhaps also put up a very old piece of mine on Trollope. After this, we shall certainly do Plutarch’s dialogue on the Delay of Divine Punishment
Most Christians today are horrified by any thought of revenge. Bring the subject up, and they are sure to quote, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” as if that were a sufficient refutation. Far from being a repudiation of vengeance as something evil, the statement is a strong affirmation of vengeance as an instrument of the divine will.
In the midst of war and rumors of war, the ongoing soap opera of “The Sussexes” seems hardly worth mentioning, but if–like some future archeologist, holding his news and sifting through the middens of a 21st century….
As the gentle reader seems to have appreciated the trope of Sunday night in Modena as an abandoned mining town in a spaghetti western, I keep pushing it. But first, a scene from Palermo.
I have reposted this piece from four years ago and made it free to everyone at the request of a friend who is now reading The Napoleon of Notting Hill.
Lately Senator Ed Markey has been threatening a congressional attack on Elon Musk’s neo-Twitter over “public health” concerns. He said, “Someone could impersonate the CDC for eight dollars, pay for it, not be authenticated and then on that site, say, ‘CDC says vaccinations are not good for you,’ That’s a public health and safety problem.”
Sunday, ten in the evening, Piazza Roma in Modena. Not a soul in sight. At lunchtime, this, one of the city’s main squares overlooking the Palazzo Ducale, was swarming with people in their Sunday best. A skating rink had been set up for the children, their unsteady shuffle on the ice choreographed to Tchaikovsky and Lehar.
